The ability of a patient to regulate the access that a third party has to the patient's medical records has become a hotly-contested topic. Typically, systems that provide the patient with the ability to control access to their medical records (e.g., patient-centric systems) are often administratively-cumbersome for medical service providers. Conversely, systems that are easily administered by medical services providers (e.g., provider-centric systems) compromise the ability of a patient to control access to their medical records.
For patient-centric systems, the patient exclusively controls access to their health care records. Since the patient's healthcare records are centralized and stored in a single location, any provider that accesses the patient's medical record is going to see a complete and current medical record, as all the medical service providers access and amend the same record set.
While the patient-centric system is preferred by patients, it is difficult to implement, since it is often desirable to provide varying levels of access to different medical service providers. Therefore, each medical service provider typically requires a unique access key to gain access to each medical record. Accordingly, this system requires a considerable amount of administrative overhead for medical service providers, in that a medical service provider is required to maintain a unique key for each medical record to which they have access.
For provider-centric systems, the medical service provider maintains a medical record for each patient to which he provides service. Since the medical service provider creates and maintains these medical records, the medical service provider has unfettered access to the medical records. Further, as each of the medical records is not reconciled with the medical records maintained by other medical service providers for the same patient, each medical record represents only a partial record of a patient's medical history.